One of the big things they clearly did right, which when I was in the middle of a half-decade project I did very wrong: they kept communicating.
I went dark - stopped blogging, stopped Tweeting - because I figured it was better to spend time on making my thing (the film Death Knight Love Story) than communicating with no deadline in sight. That was a major mistake - "out of sight, out of mind". I'm digging myself out of that hole now, and it's tough.
If your project's ETA starts running faster than you can catch it, DO NOT make my mistake :)
I think this might be a psychological hole creators can fall into. Maybe it starts out with them not wanting to communicate, one more time, that the project will take a while. Meanwhile ongoing development has hit rock bottom in term of perceived (or actual) speed. Then former fans start getting anxious, or upset, or leave - and this actually raises the bar you need to pull yourself over in order to start communicating again.
It might be. I know I fall into it all too often. When the only thing you can write is "I missed the deadline. Again.", writing a report suddenly becomes a big psychological pain. But of course if you don't communicate, you're digging a deeper hole for yourself, with every missed status e-mail it becomes harder to write the next one (unless you suddenly succeded with everything, that is, but in my experience, when you end up not writing those reports then the problem is usually deeper than missing a date by a day or two).
Since then I learned to force myself to write something, anything, just to keep people in the loop; it makes things easier for everyone, even if it hurts your self-esteem.
That's exactly how I imagined it, thanks for sharing your experience.
From the fan perspective I have to say that I don't care whether the creator missed a deadline or not. I just want to know that, somewhere, someone is working hard on making something cool. If you share a screenshot or a video every once in a while I'm happy pretty much indefinitely.
Of course there are always people dissing you for every conceivable move, but I suspect the majority of backers understand the modalities of what they're backing.
It's not just about communicating with your crew, but also your public.
If you don't have a fanbase waiting for your work to come out, it'll be much, much, MUCH harder to achieve a successful launch. I'm very good at launches, and even so, I found that the years of silence really eroded the splash I was able to make with my project when I launched it.
That's why these days I'm making a point to keep on Twittering, blogging, HNing, and so on, even when stuff is months away from release.
I'd say it's nearly impossible. One of the biggest mistakes aspiring indie developers make is that they keep their cards close to their chest. They don't want to spoil the storyline, they don't want to share their ideas because someone might steal them, etc.
Well, if you run out of steam because you don't have any support, there will be nothing left to steal and nothing to spoil. You have to share everything. If you tell people that you're making an RPG, nobody would care. If you show everything you have, discuss all your ideas, then people will get interested and will stay with you and support you by giving a fuck - the best kind of support there is.
I'm not so sure. I think it should be possible to get something done with 2-3 people in 3 years, not 10. But before I start a serious attempt I'd certainly want to learn basic things first, like how to make a fighting system. These things are only hard and time consuming when you figure them out the first time. The second or third time you are much faster.
One example I have from own experience is that one topic like that for the program I wrote in my thesis: Took me 3-6 months depending on how you count start and end date. But last week I had to do the same thing for another project and it only took me half a day. I didn't need to google anything, I didn't need to compare different variations. I knew what worked, what were the disadvantages of the most common options, choose one in 5 seconds and got it implemented. I didn't run into any of the things that took days to debug in the first attempt, because I knew where the problem areas were.
Therefore I would assume that while the first attempt of an RPG for a group of noobs might take a year or three for a prototype, a small team of experienced developers can put together a basic prototype in a few weeks.
The problem is that a prototype is not equivalent to a real fighting system you will put in a game. You will need a lot of testing so the game is challenging is fun. And it must be challenging and fun during all the game (30+ hours).
EDIT: To give an example, see a website. A small website to show some prototype will be quite quick to do. But when you need to do a website used by hundreds to thousands persons with a lot of use case, it gets far more complex.
I agree with your general assessment re: experience, but I wish people would stop talking about these sorts of things in years and months. I understand why it's difficult to express it in hours, but even a very rough estimate of total hours spent is a far, far more useful metric than "years".
My personal experience with studying Japanese has been that there's roughly two camps of people: those who become fluent-ish in 1-2 years, and those who know ~100 kanji after 3 years (1-2k for fluency). The primary difference between these two camps is that the former studies 6-8 hours a day, and the latter has Japanese classes thrice a week, that's it.
Speaking in hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of hours gives you a much better idea of what's actually necessary to make the magic happen, and makes it easier to judge how well you're doing: is making barely any progress in 1 week a bad thing, or a really bad thing? That depends on whether a week translates to 3 hours or 50 hours.
I agree! I'd also wonder why so little information is given in hours. We have that likely horizon of mastery at 10k hours and we have a soft limit of "usability" at about 3k hours. But maybe the thing is, nobody really counts. Like, I can tell you when I started to study my major, which led me to spend a lot of time on programming, taking it serious for the first time. Now I work full time as a software developer but do I spend 30 hours, or 10 hours, or 50 hours programming a week? Can't tell. There are lot of things involved, no matter if you're a student or a full time worker. Not all of them count. And going back to your Japanese example. Sometimes the drunken two hours you've spent in a Karaoke bar trying to impress local girls was worth much more than the previous 10 hours study session because these two hours were marked as important memories by your brain and the previous ten hours were boring. It's really hard to calculate, right? Also that study which came up with that 10k hours for mastery stated that many people very much overestimate hours spent, which from feeling I would agree. Like, since I work full time I don't believe any more that people really spend 40+ hours working. It's closer to 20 or 30 hours depending on the person. The rest is spent smoking, chatting, fighting via email, reading HN. And from own experience I also know that 12 hours of doing nothing can be just as tiring as working hard. ;)
We talked about years because that's what most people look at. I gave this simple breakdown before:
"Let's say tomorrow an AoD-like game is announced by a "real" studio. I'd expect at least 3 years in development and at least 15 people working on it full-time. If you expect less, please explain.
So, 15 people x 40 hours a week (a bit on the low side, I know) x 52 weeks x 3 years = 93,600 man-hours vs 4 x 15 hours a week x 52 x 10 = 31,200 man-hours (roughly a third).
Some facts:
Civ 5 has been in development for 3 years, 52 people team = 324,480 man-hours. Fallout 3 was in development for 4 years. Gothic - more than 4 years. NWN - around 5 years, Witcher - more than 5 years, fairly large team, but the quality is undeniable. Arcanum 2.5 years. KOTOR 3 years. Fallout 3 years (In 1994 Steve Jackson mentioned that Interplay was working on a post-apoc game using GURPS)."
Yes, people tend to underestimate how long it is to do a RPG.
I'm currently composing music for a RPG two of my friends are doing in their sparetime. It is in development since 9 years. It is really hard to make it interesting and fun to play. We hope to release a demo this year.
As a professional game developer I have so much respect for people who do things like this out of passion and achieve the miracle of actually shipping. Finishing any game under these circumstances is an accomplishment. This is a huge accomplishment and I hope they are very proud.
If you don't have anything to catch people's interest for some time there's not much reason to add modding support. Modding support is another area of X things you need to add, change, debug, test, adapt to feedback. And without a game in the first place nobody will even look at your modding tools.
It's interesting to read the negative reviews, most of them are so incredibly ridiculous.
Several people complain there's not enough content, but each one of them had put 30 odd hours into the game. Almost everyone else is complaining about the difficulty, which the steam page makes clear is a selling point of the game.
It seems these days comments and ratings are almost useless. I wish the demo would make a big comeback so I can determine whether I like a game for myself.
The demo has been available from day one. We want people to try the game first and see if they like our design. You can download it either from our Steam page or Atomic Gamer:
The demo gives you access to the first 3 locations and about 30 quests. While it hasn't been updated since Nov 2013 due to the lack of time and thus doesn't have the latest features, it does represent the game well. If you don't like the demo, you definitely won't like the full game.
> You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam
> —for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware
> requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe
> you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.
Been using it successfully. Just can't have more than 2 hours played.
Yeah, I know. I'd still rather have a demo. I don't like the idea of using my credit card as a means to demo a game I might be interested in. If a game I wanted doesn't meet my expectations after purchase, then that's a different matter.
Because some people still expect to win simply by showing up. We tell them the game is hard, they think it's a wink-wink message that doesn't apply to them. We tell them the optional fights are the hardest (i.e. being a hero is a harsh business), they jump into every opportunity to be a hero because that's what they are used to - if the game offers you a fight, surely it's scaled to their level. It's not.
I went dark - stopped blogging, stopped Tweeting - because I figured it was better to spend time on making my thing (the film Death Knight Love Story) than communicating with no deadline in sight. That was a major mistake - "out of sight, out of mind". I'm digging myself out of that hole now, and it's tough.
If your project's ETA starts running faster than you can catch it, DO NOT make my mistake :)